Cyber Attacks Mutually Assured Disruption of Intangible Assets!

Throughout the 1960’s, there was consistent reference by governments and defense sectors’ about MAD (mutually assured destruction), i.e., each side possessing sufficient nuclear ‘mega-tonnage’ to assure mutual destruction of the other, should war breakout.

A similar analogy is evident today, but its origins do not lie in the delivery of nuclear weapons rather in the delivery of massive cyber attacks designed to simultaneously take down and/or substantially disrupt multiple pillars of a targeted countries’ infrastructure, ala MAD – ‘mutually assured (sector, grid) disruption’!

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I and countless others presumed the aircraft strikes in New York and Washington were diversionary, as tragic as they were, to be followed by massive cross sector cyber attacks. My anger and curiosity that a cyber attack was imminent prompted me to call acquaintances employed in various sectors throughout the U.S., one of which was the director of a top tier research university’s ‘super-computing’ center. My rationale was that a super-computing center would likely be an initial point of detection to a larger cyber attack should there be one in the offing. To my disillusionment, such a rationale was in error, at least in this instance.

The capability to thwart, mitigate, or contain the asymmetric and adverse cascading effects that a coordinated cyber attack would likely be designed to produce presents obvious challenges and creeping costs insofar as companies and organizations keeping pace with the infinite risks and threats which can seemingly materialize anytime and anyplace with no vapor trail, to maximize the intended infrastructure disruption and chaos.

I suspect there are management teams, c-suites, and boards, ranging from Fortune ranked firms to SME’s (small, medium enterprises), which have already engaged in discussions regarding the practicalities and costs of continuing to deploy state-of-the-art cyber attack – risk mitigation (data-information security) products.

There are two related reasons why I believe such discussions are inevitable…

it is a globally universal and irreversible economic fact that rising percentages, 80+% of most company’s value, sources of revenue, and ‘building blocks’ for growth, profitability, and sustainability lie in – evolve directly from intangible assets, primarily in the form of intellectual, structural, relationship-social and competivity capital.

data/information generation, storage, and retrieval needs are continually ratcheting up to the mega-terabyte arena, particularly with the rapid recognition and rise of intangible asset intensive and dependant companies.

To be sure, efforts to thwart the actions of the growing global array of ultra-sophisticated economic and competitive advantage adversaries and legacy free players engaged in hacking and/or state sponsored entities capable of delivering massive cyber attacks are challenges which, at this juncture, cannot be dismissed or relegated to the uninitiated.

I am not suggesting companies disregard their fiduciary responsibilities or regulatory mandates. Instead, I am suggesting a company’s desire to curtail the rising costs and operational disruptions associated with investing and deploying all-the-more nuanced IT security products that deliver consistent and measurable returns, technologies must be developed with capabilities to differentiate company information and data on a variable continuum. For example, introducing the capability to differentiate data-information that should receive the maximum safeguards, which initially I propose, encompass these four factors, i.e., the (intangible) assets…